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Super Mario World 25th Anniversary

Super Mario World is 25 years old today in North America. In my opinion it’s the best 2D Mario for a number of reasons especially from a personal nostalgia factor. I got my Super Nintendo with this packed in and it was my first console I could call my own and in turn Super Mario World was the first game I could label the same.

My testimony isn’t import though. Just look online at the love rom hackers have made to Super Mario World over the years. There’s tons of mods, too many for one man to go through and review. Instead I found one particular hack that astounded me and is probably the most profound on this, the 25th Anniversary. It’s called Super Mario World Redrawn.

The project began when a poster, IceGoom, uploaded a new graphical set on smwcentral.net, a fan site for Super Mario World, on 16 December 2013. Bothered by the lack of graphical retouches to the game, he redrew every sprite in it. Long story short Super Mario World Redrawn recently finished, or at least entered a 1.0 status as far as I could find.

That is to say until I dug deeper. Turns outs it actually began in 2006. Several demos were released between times of darkness wherein nothing was posted. I deduced this from another fan site, which was last modified in 2012. The most recent stuff was the website I found originally. And the patch, with additional info, was found on romhacking.net.

Regardless of the mangled history, this mod took what was already a beautiful 16-Bit Nintendo classic and morphed into what looks like an indie game that use the same pixel style to celebrate treasures like Super Mario World. One such example would be Braid. It’s wonderful, I’m addicted, and you can see this amazing hack for yourself below. If you want to play the game yourself, you can get the patch here. As for the rom of Super Mario World, well, I won’t help on that front. Be that as it may I wish you luck and I hope you have as much fun with this hack as I am.